Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday June 12, 2014 @12:14PM
from the listen-up dept.

A while ago you had the chance to ask programmer and open source advocate Bruce Perens about the future of open source, its role in government, and a number of other questions. Below you'll find his answers and an update on what he's doing now.

Er...what's left in "open source" to talk about?
by xxxJonBoyxxx

Having lived through the entire lifecycle of "open source," it seems like its place in development communities and businesses is well-established, with a mix of different licensing and deployment models for whatever anyone wants to do.
So...is there really anything interesting left in "open source" to talk about? (Software patents, maybe, but even that's picked up some case law.)

Perens: There's a lot to talk about, if you consider that “Open Source” is a way of introducing people to the ethos of Free Software as much as it is an economic and technical paradigm for software development. The ethos part of the job is hardly done.

There is always going to be a conflict of interest between a company's needs and your needs as a user or customer. Who has control? It should be you, rather than the company that made the software or a government that tells them what to put in it as the U.S. Government did with RSA Security.

Imagine the billions of dollars paid by companies that thought they were buying security while RSA had a clear conflict between the government's needs and those of the customer. Now, Heartbleed has shown us that there are some problems that don't have enough eyes, but I still can't think of any way to resolve the conflict-of-interest issue without giving everyone the right to read, modify, use, and redistribute software. A third-party can then audit and repair government-inserted security issues as Red Hat did by auditing GNU TLS and making their results and a patch public. If that same problem exists in proprietary systems – and I assure you it does – you can't see it, you can't fix it, you can't help yourself or others, and if others know something they can't help you. But we've not made much progress in selling that idea to the end-user.

State of the Union address / 16 this year
by Martin S.

The OSI is 16 this year and in many ways has experienced a difficult childhood but has grown stronger as a result. What challenges do you foresee for the future?

Perens: Please forgive me for interpolating your question a bit: the Open Source and Free Software movement are important to talk about, OSI the organization isn't. And of course Free Software is older than 16 years, it goes back to the genesis of software.
We're still not where we need to be: to the point where everyone can run Free Software for every task, without the threat of litigation over patents, and without being locked in by digital rights management.
Regarding Software Patents, we've backslid from the time that we were able to derail a thrust for a Pan-European unified software patent system. That's essentially happening without our objection now. Why? Because we're no longer seen as a movement for helping people and giving them control, we've positioned ourselves as merely an economic and software development paradigm. That was a bad move. Folks, pump up the philanthropic and helping-others aspects of what you do! You dis-empower yourselves and our movement when you fail to do so.

I think we've also backslid regarding DRM, as shown by the W3C accepting a DRM API into their standards process. Indeed, we've not made much progress regarding viewers and reader's rights to use any device, and to have a durable copy of their media that works today and forever because it isn't in some black-box format. A lot of us convert those Kindle books to open formats on the sly, just to preserve them for the future. We should be able to do that in the bright light of day without fear. Or we should not have to do it.

I have been encouraged by the Science Fiction writers. Very many of them refrain from use of DRM these days. Their revenues don't suffer. Neither did the revenues of my own book series. Unfortunately, readers other than the Sci-Fi market don't know what to ask for. Can we tell them convincingly?

I think we all need to think about what we're doing with our lives and how we can help improve electronic freedom for everyone. Together we have the power, we're just not using it.

Automation Technology Displacing Tomorrows Worker
by SethJohnson

I'd like to know your perspective on the future need for programmers while automation technology continues to displace workers in many industries.

Perens: I don't oppose automation displacing people from their jobs, but for a reason you might not expect. Human beings are demeaned when they perform “mechanical” tasks for their employment. They are not machines! Whether picking fruit or stock in a warehouse, People are not enriched by doing it and it does not exercise their unique capabilities as thinking entities. So, I'll ask a different question: When we can automate so much, why is it still necessary for so many to do the most demeaning sort of work just to feed, shelter, and clothe their families? Our society needs to move those people into rewarding work instead of the demeaning mechanical sort. We do a very good job at generating obscene amounts of wealth for a few while too many suffer. What are you doing about that?

Regarding whether programmers will be automated out of a job:
Once “computer” was a job title for people who did math all day, and the automation that so completely replaced them in that job was called an “electronic computer”. Those people moved on to other jobs, often as programmers.

What about the future need for programmers? There was a big, government-funded scientific research project to develop “automatic programming”. It produced what we today call the “compiler”. It reduced the price of programming, but that actually increased the demand for programmers.

The job market for programmers will dry up when all of the programs that a mass of people would ever desire have been written and perfected, regardless of how automated our tools become and how powerful future computers may be. I'm not sure that such an end of need is a possible condition. It's sort of like saying that there will be no further need for horse coach designers once the coach is perfected. We stopped needing what we could imagine in the 1830's, and went on to something else.

If we ever arrive at artificial general intelligence, we may obsolete human beings as no more than an evolutionary step on the way to something else. But that is only one of many possible futures, and not an impending one.

Obamacare
by MouseTheLuckyDog

Should the software used for Obamacare be open source. I don't just mean the website, but also things like the software controlling pharmaceuticals, X-rays, MRI, maintaining health records etc. ?

Perens: Allow me a slight diversion to talk about Obamacare. My wife, son, and I have each individually been denied private health insurance although we're healthy, for what is essentially medical trivia. One insurance company rejected us on the grounds of my son having a certain medical test, even though he passed it. I own my one-man company, and until this year had no way to provide my family with insurance. Fortunately for us my wife was able to get it through her employer, but we would have been sunk if she had lost her job.

I think Obamacare will do one really big thing that truly scares the Republican Party. It will free up millions of smart people to be self-employed, who formerly stayed in the corporate world. These folks are in their 40's and 50's, have families to take care of, but previously could not reliably get insurance on their own. The small-business revolution will come not because these people actually buy care through an exchange rather than getting it through a spouse's employer, but because they know that they can get it when they need it.

The small business revolution that Obamacare drives will create disruptive technology and thus economic churn as income moves from older established companies to more new ones. This shift from mega-business to smaller business erodes the Republican money base, and that's why the Republican Party must kill Obamacare at all costs, regardless of the damage to their own people.

Now, what about the software that is used for “safety of life and property” applications? This isn't just health systems under Obamacare, it's the stuff that operates elevators, aircraft and air traffic control, your automobile, anything where a failure can hurt people.

Karen Sandler does a great talk about this called “Unchain my Heart”. She has an implanted pacemaker due to cardiomyopathy (enlarged heart), and was justifiably reluctant to have one with proprietary software implanted.

There is no question that software failures have killed people going back to Therac-25 and probably earlier, and will continue to do so.

Software that is in life-and-property-critical applications should be disclosed. It can have all of the power of copyright protection, but it should be possible to audit it. Everyone should be able to discuss its issues, with quotes of the applicable source code as needed, on-line and under public view. If the security of your Bluetooth-enabled pacemaker is a crock (as embedded software so often is), we should be able to tell you about it, and get something done.

My experience is that people code better when the whole world is looking over their shoulder.

Credit for the OSS movement
by Anonymous Coward

Some years ago, around 2006, I attended a talk from Eric S. Raymond at a venue large enough to accommodate his massive ego and still leave room for attendees. He informed that he had essentially given HP their Open Source strategy. Your name was not mentioned once. I am curious what were your discussions like at HP during your time there, specifically in regards to the ideals of Free Software versus Open Source. My question specifically:
What legal and financial hurdles and impacts, if any, did HP (and other companies) face when deciding between Open Source and Free Software models? I.e., what proprietary assets/IP could not be completely "freed"? What were the savings/costs associated with the decisions?

Perens: At some point I accumulated enough credit for achievements that it became unnecessary to fight over it :-) . But I am hardly without flaws. Most visible might be that I want to get things done and don't mind trampling others if that's what it takes. I try to keep my ego down enough so that I get through those narrow doors.

The worst problems I saw at HP had little to do with Open Source. What I remember most was the sadness. There were and are many smart people there, and so many of us were conscious that the company was in a sort of death spiral and that we couldn't do anything about it. The “pretexting” scandal was to the discredit of the board, the general counsel actually took the 5th in front of Congress on national television! Carly (the CEO) asked all of the employees to take a voluntary pay cut in the same month that she and other Board officers sold tens of Millions of dollars of HP stock. I remember my boss (a Section Manager, now the CTO) announcing at a meeting that an employee had gotten a “Reinvention Memo”. That meant lay-off, a sarcastic re-framing of HP's “Reinvent” motto that showed how even upper managers like him were in despair. There was a series of ill-advised acquisitions of second-best or declining companies that HP failed to turn around, and then sold for cents on the dollar two years after acquiring them. The Compaq merger put the company at the very top of a business with vanishingly-small margins.

There was one really bad day that I guess is safe to talk about now, more than 10 years later, because the information is already in the public and thus no longer subject to NDA: Microsoft showed HP their plans to sue the Open Source projects for the Linux Kernel, Samba, Sendmail, and a list of other projects. Someone immediately shot me an HP VP's memo recounting that meeting and concluding that we should back off of Open Source before the lawsuits started. When I passed it to my boss, I was told to keep it quiet. But I was hired to be an Open Source community leader first, and an HP officer second, and keeping quiet about that meant betraying the Open Source developer community. I just hated that and it poisoned my involvement with HP.

Microsoft eventually used SCO as a proxy to achieve what it disclosed to HP that day. I'd been warned long before that happened, and could do nothing until SCO announced their damaging but ultimately unsuccessful jihad against Linux.

What I think is worth remembering about HP is that it was once the great tech company that people wanted to work for, as Apple or Google might be for many today. I think a lot of what made it great left with Agilent. The Test and Measurement business was a low-volume, high-margin business that required lots of too-highly-paid old smart people who worked in expensive labs in Palo Alto, California. That became the most costly place to do anything largely due to HP's own success. But Test and Measurement was also the brain-trust of the company, and lent its creativity to all of HP's other aspects. So we lost a lot, I think, when Agilent was spun off of HP.

HP's problem regarding Open Source and Linux was that systems running Linux competed with other HP lines running HP-UX or Microsoft, and HP was structured as Organizational Silos. Each line had its own sales-people, and different lines competed with each other for the same customer. HP-9000 folks were always complaining because Linux undercut HP-UX and thus HP-9000, as were folks who sold Microsoft Windows systems based on x86. If I said anything in the press about Open Source or Linux, a customer would ask one of those single-line sales-people about it, and it would come back to my boss as a complaint rather than a sales opportunity.

HP was always to some extent in Microsoft's pocket, although they were also aware that Microsoft had screwed them and would continue to do so. HP de-emphasized further development of the HP 9000 hardware because Microsoft had told them in the late 80's that they were soon to have an enterprise-quality NT. HP believed it, but MS failed to deliver for a decade. That lost HP Billions while Sun Microsystems took the engineering workstation market from HP. The HP officer who made that decision of course went on to be a Microsoft executive.

What we did achieve at HP was a good process for deciding what to do with Open Source when individual opportunities came up. If you wanted to incorporate Open Source in a product, or you had a business reason to Open Source something, we resolved the legal issues, the community issues, we even handled some security aspects and achieved a reasonable level of reuse. That could all be achieved by middle managers. So, everybody in the company knew that it was OK to use Open Source, but there was a process you had to go through. It wasn't particularly expensive, it did sometimes sink multiple days of some engineer in doing paperwork, but that's just due diligence and we ended up on a better legal footing when we used Open Source than otherwise.

There were things we decided not to Open Source because there was no good business reason for doing so. We weren't UNICEF, so there had to be a business reason for everything. There were times when legacy customers would have gained benefit if we brought one of HP's nine legacy operating systems to Open Source, but untangling the proprietary software that originated with third parties from the rest was too difficult. There were a few times when it was decided not to Open Source a legacy product because we were afraid that IBM might use it to sell their hardware against ours. Once that happened with a system that had only 5000 existing customers, and it would have been better for the customers for HP to open it but the decision – not mine – was not to do so.

I've since helped other companies start their own internal Open Source Process, and still do so today.

What we never achieved within HP, what I never had the power to do, was: to get HP to completely stand behind any innovative product regardless of what that meant for old-line products, to make innovation the #1 job of the company, and to grow a brand-new company from the old one every year that they were in business. They needed to embrace disruptive technologies as a pioneer rather than have the disruption done to HP by competitors. I think they tried to kill the Silo organizational structure after I left, I don't know how successful that was.

Q3 for BP
by postbigbang

What are your five biggest fears for safety on the Internet today, and where do you believe responsible admins should put their efforts for those five?

Perens: Centralization: too much depends on too few companies. It's not entirely a matter of architecture, it's a matter of getting customers to distribute themselves. So maybe it's a social engineering problem to a great extent.

Conflict of interest: Back to those companies again. They are operating your internet infrastructure, and their interest isn't yours. I found out today that my kid's school is using Turnitin. The problems with that are well covered at Wikipedia. We need a way to provide sustainable infrastructure that works for the customer, instead of exploits them. I'm for non-profit common carriers and services, using Open Source.

Politics: we still don't have much of a footing, despite our numbers, and even our wealth! We need to get more of the people we listen to and admire into elected offices, and in communications regulators like ITU and FCC. Way too much of the leadership there is from the exploitation side.

Privacy: I am afraid we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot pursuing it. We're rapidly heading for a locked-down Internet as IETF pushes for an HTTPS-only web. From there it's only a very short step to certified browsers, user digital signature requirements, Open Source and anonymity both locked out of the system. Yes, the metadata thing is unsettling, but we also have to be clear that we employ spies to work for our country and to help protect us, and they have an important job to do. We need to work on the politics of regulation and oversight of our nation's espionage rather than the nerd approach, which is to attempt to treat a social problem as a bug in the network software.

Economics: If OpenSSL had been dual-licensed AGPL3 and commercial, we would probably not have Heartbleed. There would have been money from its commercial users. Imagine companies like Intuit using OpenSSL and not giving much back to its maintenance at all! That was a mistake. IMO dual-licensing has a bad reputation because of MySQL, and also because some folks at Red Hat have promoted against it. We need to revisit it.

Moderation
by symbolset

Do you find your views on blended/mixed license models evolving over time? Is it time to lay down the pitchforks some of the time?

Perens: PR isn't really a pitchfork. It's always been about people who are calling something Open Source when it is not. Not against mixed models. If you want to have something that has some community participation and doesn't meet the Open Source Definition, don't call it Open Source or Free Software and nobody will pursue you with pitchforks. We may continue to say our way is better, but that's fair.

In that vein, keep in mind that Creative Commons is not Open Source. A few, actually a minority, of creative commons licenses are. About the only right that all Creative Commons licenses have in common is the right to read.

Open source HARDWARE
by unixisc

What are your views on Open source hardware? Is it as important as open source software, or less important, or not important at all?

Perens: Let's please call it Open Hardware, in the interest of simplicity and good marketing. Unless you are interested in calling it Free-Libre Open Source Hardware or FLOSSHW. I bet there's somebody that silly.

I think it's important. But there's an important thing we should be aware of about Open Hardware. It's backwards in a way. Richard Stallman's Free Software movement opposed software being copyrighted. Copyright does not, for the most part, apply to hardware designs because they are functional (read about CAI v. Altai to understand this). Patents apply to hardware designs, but most Open Hardware designers never pursue a patent on their designs. What then do they license to others?

It turns out that we have a group of people at CERN, and one of my favorite lawyers and Yahoo, and even me, trying to add restrictions to something that is, for the most part, already in the public domain. And it came to me that this was backwards, and that we could be working against our own interest that way.

We all get to use the vast body of electronic designs that we've read about in magazines since the dawn of ham radio. Now, imagine if those were suddenly copyrighted and under enforceable licenses.

The problem is that when we start licensing things that are actually in the public domain, we create norms that the courts take seriously. And they start enforcing licenses on things that could not be licensed before. We really can write new law when what we do gets to a court case, and we want to be careful what law that is. If we were responsible for taking hardware designs from public domain to copyrighted status, we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot.

So, for a while I was uncomfortable with my own Open Hardware evangelism. Was I doing the right thing? I think I've worked out the right path now and will be warning the community about this issue.

There's also a lot of confusion about how effective Open Hardware licenses are. If you make a 3D printer and you think your license keeps other people from manufacturing copies, sorry! It does not protect your design unless you have filed patents. Copyright won't do it. It might keep people from selling the plans, but not the devices.

We also have a bunch of people who use “CC BY-NC” licenses on their designs and then call it Open Source Hardware! Funny how eager they are to call it “Open Source” and then they don't even follow the rules of Open Source. Open Source includes the right to use in any way. If it's “no commercial use allowed” like CC BY-NC, it's not Open Source.

So, there's room for a lot of education there.

Re:How do we address the weaknesses of Open Source
by Tiger4

More to the point, how do you reply to the criticism and practice that Open Source is worthless because there is no company to back it? I run into this all the time. First, no one stop shop to get tech support from if we have trouble. Second, No company to go after for liability. Third, no company to maintain regular bugfixes and general currency and freshness. We don't have a policy against Open Source, we just have a standard the vast majority of (perfectly adequate) software can never meet.

Perens: Well, I bet your employer doesn't do as well as Google. Or any number of companies that make money hand over fist while using an Open Source infrastructure. So, I thought I could stop evangelizing on this issue. But maybe not.

Having a shop to get tech support from is important. But you guys are kidding yourselves if you think there isn't one. Even IBM will do that. Indeed, they make a great deal of money implementing and maintaining solutions that are glued-together Open Source programs for the most part.

Or is it that you want a different company for every different program, like in the proprietary world. That's not so nice when you have to use them, is it? You spend the day trying to convince them that their product is broken and having to deal with them pointing fingers at each other rather than fixing your problem. Sometimes it's nicer when one contractor really can fix all of the pieces. How do you do that without Open Source?

The liability issue is a red herring. How often have you actually sued a software provider and collected all of your damages and court costs? Many of them would go bankrupt first. I am an expert witness on some of those cases, and they cost so much to fight that you lose even if you win.

But there are the big vendors like Microsoft, you're safe with them because they have the cash, right? How often do you hear of a customer actually collecting court costs and damages from them? Go read your EULA.

If you actually want liability that works, you need the vendor to provide insurance-backed support for your individual account. That means the insurance policy covers your account, not their other 10,000 customers, and it persists with you as the beneficiary if the vendor goes away. Most companies aren't willing to pay for that.

Regarding regular bug-fixes and freshness, this is another thing that it's difficult to get for proprietary software. Do you really know what the bugs are and if they are being fixed? I bet that information is a trade secret. This is an area in which it's easier to work with Open Source.

Again, I didn't think I still had to make this sale. Usually, the companies that think they don't use Open Source these days really do, it's just that engineering hasn't told management. I get called in to help the managers make policy when they find out.

Gun Ownership
by Tenebrousedge

You are on record as being rather firmly against private ownership of firearms. Frankly, I thought this extremity of anti-gun zealotry was a Republican myth, a straw man used to rile the rabble. I understand that people in less civilized territories will on rare occasion use guns for murder and atrocity, I am not aware of this impulse being a general hazard of gun ownership.

I'm from Alaska. All the people that I know who have guns have only ever used them for hunting. I'm less sympathetic to those who can acquire an alternate hobby besides shooting, but there are yet many places where hunting is a means of subsistence. I've known many people to bow-hunt, but I suspect if your dinner depended on your marksmanship you might prefer the more effective instrument. Does your plan involve screwing hunters as well as the millions of other lawful citizens?

Originally we are a revolutionary state, and I believe the People yet preserve the right to revolution. Furthermore, Mao was right about the origins of political power: violence is the defining characteristic of government. Do you believe that the 'tree of liberty' is no longer hematophagic? Else, by what means are we intended to obtain and keep self-governance?

Perens: I'll start by calling B.S. on your dialogue above. The existence of disapproval of the private ownership of firearms isn't a “Republican myth” unless you have never heard of the United Kingdom, where – the horrors! - private ownership of handguns and the like is not allowed. You should get out of the county sometime. Indeed, you'd have to be living in Plato's cave to be ignorant of Lincoln, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and his mom, poor congressperson Giffords deprived of part of her brain and the power of speech, and 11,000 firearm murders in the U.S. every year. So thanks for taking advantage of my interview to give a little deceptive speech rather than just ask a question.

The last time I was in Denali, where 1000 pound grizzly bears would walk right in front of me down the main shopping street in town, I felt the urge to carry some large-bore repeating rifle. Not that it's easy to stop a grizzly. But I understand that out in the boonies, it's different than it is in Oakland.

There's a crime scene with some teenager shot dead a short drive from where I live, almost any evening. And unfortunately there is no shortage of people who decide to find a dozen innocent folks, often kids, to snuff before they take their own lives or persuade a cop to do it for them.

What of my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness when every nut-case seems to have been issued sufficient automatic weaponry to cut all that I love right out of this world?

I don't have firearms in my home, and my kid doesn't get more than a BB-gun to plink targets with, because I don't trust myself to be 100% sane for every moment of the rest of my life. People aren't built that way.

I learned that from my dad. He killed some Nazi soldiers and brought home a Luger, with the firing pin carefully removed and destroyed. So we had an authentic human trophy in the house, but not one that would fire. Dad was a reserve and was activated for both WWII and Korea. He had a Purple Heart, a bravery medal, and a panel chock full of campaign ribbons. But he wouldn't trust himself to be 100% sane for the rest of his days and keep a functional firearm at home.

Each society decides on the balance between liberty and protecting the weak from the strong. My problem with firearms is that they make you too strong for the safety of the people around you, and you are not capable of rationally wielding that strength throughout every moment of your life. People do break, and when they do, things happen for which every one of us should be sorry. So yes, I do believe the balance as it exists in the United States today is wrong. If you are not a subsistence hunter and you don't face ursus arctos and maritimus when you take out the garbage, I would indeed have you disable your weapons by leading the barrel, which is a more permanent means of disabling a firearm than just removing the firing pin.

In Jefferson's time, when individuals working together could fight off a regiment, individual ownership of firearms was an implicit limit on the power of the state. No longer can any number of people weigh their armor against that of a modern military, rather than pick at its edges dishonorably with IEDs. The Tree of Liberty today is renewed by the blood of journalists, not marksmen.

I grew up reading Heinlein, like so many of us, and was captured by the romantic image of the armed freeholder. R.A.H. didn't bother to preface his stories with any mention that he was a failure as a miner and too sickly for most of his life to survive without society's protection. For him, those stories were wish-fulfillment. Heinlein invented some aspects of modern warfare (his contribution to the Operations Room or CIC is most cited), further arming society against the individual and killing his own dream for good if it wasn't dead already.

Perhaps there are real freeholders protecting their rights with their guns somewhere, but mostly there are fat old guys with a 300-channel cable TV package and some freeholder fantasy going. Kids don't have to die for the sake of some old fart's toys.

It's damn past time that the anti-firearm folks got as much lobbying power as the NRA. There are enough of us. Count me in if you can make that work.

Thanks for the interview, folks!

Perens: I'd like to tell people what I'm up to this year.

At the moment, I'm CEO of a startup called Algoram. We make a power-efficient mobile software-defined-radio transceiver, which is to dual-licensed Open Hardware and commercial with some tricks that let us both be Open and preserve our revenue, and we're building dual-licensed Open Source and commercial software for digital radio communications. The radio can use any modulation on frequencies of 50 to 1000 MHz, although it's not made for spread-spectrum. Its major market will be commercial and municipal two-way radio, where they don't particularly want Open Source, but hams are experimenters and their Open Source development helps us.

A partner and I have funded the company out-of-pocket through getting our first product working. It's better to ask for venture funding when you already have something to sell.

I'm also operating my consulting firm to pay the bills. I work with law firms and companies that need help with Open Source. Sometimes they need policy and processes, some have been GPL violators who need a path to compliance. I am the bridge between law and engineering, explaining each side to the other, training engineers to identify legal problems in software and work with attorneys effectively, rewriting part of a customer's product to cure an infringement. I get to do good (by helping companies to comply with Free Software licenses) and pay the bills too.

I'm not doing the Free Software Evangelist job very much this year. Taking a break after working on this since about 1991 feels good. I haven't changed what I believe, but I won't be traveling much for Free Software conferences in 2014 and I've turned off a lot of writing and mailing-list participation. I will be back to that, but right now I'm focused on running a company and making something new.

I'm sort of surprised at the amount of vitriol toward Eric that comes up unprompted (at least by me) just because I'm interviewed on Slashdot. I'm going to take the high road and not participate in it.

I'm sure he has opinions about Coke vs. Pepsi, Football vs. Baseball, Brownies (chewy vs. cake, frosted vs. unfrosted), and so on. He's a thoughtful guy and they may even be interesting, but his expertise is in IT not beverages, sports, baked goods or politics.

I'm sure everyone has an opinion on gun rights but I don't see why we should read about it here.

I did ask another question about Open Source, which Bruce answered immediately in the comment thread. I discovered that he was against the private ownership of firearms via his personal site, and like I said, I thought that his position was mythical. I am sure that he also has opinions about those other matters, but he doesn't advertise them. I apologize for any inconvenience.

The insightful part is realizing that healthcare availability provides more "economic freedom", as the libertarians like to call it. The part about Republicans hating it is irrelevant. It doesn't matter if Republicans love or hate it, freedom is freedom.

I think you have to look at where the funding comes from for Republican and conservative causes. Don't just look at candidate funding, even election advertising has a lot of funding that isn't straight to the candidate.

Although there might be no shortage of self-employed Republicans, they don't really call the shots for the party. It's the very deep pockets who do.

So? You don't think that the Republican Party leaders wouldn't want more self-employed voters? Even ignoring the tendency of the self-employed to vote Republican, your whole line of reasoning is just... odd. "Oh, no!" say the Republican Party Corporate Masters, "Where will we get our laborers from if [a small fraction of] our employees leave to work for themselves? There are so few people without jobs -- whatever will we do?"

Listen, I'm glad that you've been able to find insurance coverage, but that sa

Actually, we would have had a much less expensive plan, but we couldn't get it by the conservatives. It's called single-payer, and I've used it in Canada. It has also been available to me in a dozen other countries that I've worked in, but fortunately I never needed it there. It works pretty well. So well indeed that most civilized countries have it.

I'm sorry that you didn't understand my presentation. Or that you understood it and can't accept it. I've thought about it for a very long time and I'm pretty s

Actually, we would have had a much less expensive plan, but we couldn't get it by the conservatives. It's called single-payer....

You couldn't get it by the conservatives? Which conservatives voted for the current crapfest? Do not forget that ObamaCare was rammed through without a single Republican vote in the House or Senate. Think about that. A complete transformation and takeover of the U.S. Healthcare system and the Democrats rammed it through without a shred of bipartisan support.

I'm sorry that you didn't understand my presentation. Or that you understood it and can't accept it. I've thought about it for a very long time and I'm pretty sure of it.

How about that I understand it, but don't believe it (and the facts and logic back me up).

I think it just proves that well-reasoned and idiotic are often found in the same package.

But my gun-enjoying anti-state self does spot a distinguished air of elitist statism in Bruces opinion. Also I resent his method of painting gun enthusiasts and constitutionalists with a distinctly negative brush.

It's the Emptiness of a Politicized Life [freebeacon.com]. Progressives have failed to develop tolerance because theyâ(TM)ve never had to confront their idols disagreeing with them. It comes as a shock whenever their ideological bubble has been penetrated. And when your bubble is penetrated, the opposition must be destroyed. Perens doesn't see any problem with denouncing people he disagrees with because he rarely if ever actually encounters such people in his life. He lives in a bubble. The Grievance Industrial C [freebeacon.com]

I've never seen the movement to HTTPS-only to be bad, but as this always envolves a certificate and therefore registration, I now think that there might be disadvantages connected with forced HTTPS. To some extent, this even resembles the russian blogger law. To run a website, one must have a certificate. To have a certificate, one must register himself. As I still want more websites (including this one) to switch to HTTPS I realize that enforced encryption can be seen as bad. I hope the IETF figures out a

"There is always going to be a conflict of interest between a company's needs and your needs as a user or customer. Who has control? It should be you, rather than the company that made the software or a government that tells them what to put in it as the U.S. Government did with RSA Security."

Why should I have any conflict of interest with my customers? I make software of type X that I enjoy making and am good at. My customers who want this type of software buy it from me or subscribed to some SaaS arrang

When the constitution was written the Weak (US residents) taking on the Strong state (the British crown) *was* a very real concern. It made sense then, it does't make as much sense now. Unless of course you plan on taking on 'the state' (United states military).

Every gun used in a crime in America was purchased legally by a Law Abiding Gun Owner. Every. Single. One. Law Abiding Gun Owners have clearly demonstrated they are not capable of self regulation, and thus need to be better regulated.

The UK is Great Britain, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, some other pieces, and some of those are partially self-governing (I don't know much about how the Irish Free State works, etc). And then we have the ex-colonies and client states which still consider the Queen their head of state.

"Ireland" can mean either the island or the country called the Republic of Ireland, which is about 80% of the island. The Republic is not part of the UK, it is a completely independent country. Northern Ireland (the northern 20%) is part of the UK. The "Irish Free State" was the name of what is now the Republic of Ireland in the 1920s and 30s and is not a term used any more.

Technically true, but this doesn't really address Grishnakh's main point: an island (and it's not unreasonable to treat the UK as an island, all in all) is indeed probably easier to keep things out of. (Forgive the end-of-sentence preposition.)

Grishnakh's argument falls down [slashdot.org] when you compare the USA to France.

The problem with these stats is that they lump everyone in together. Gun-related suicides, for instance, aren't even worth considering in these stats; people will kill themselves one way or another, guns just make it easier and faster. Homicides are the important stat. However, even here most gun-related homicides in this country are likely because of gang-related violence. If you're not a gang member or other violent criminal, you have much less to worry about. So how about some stats which exclude gang members? It'd be interesting to see how the US ranks there.

Last I heard, El Salvador was the most dangerous country for an adult male to live in, as every adult male there has a 1 in 9 chance of being murdered in their lifetime. What are the gun laws like there?

As for first-world countries, the US doesn't really count there. There's too much poverty and income disparity for the US to really be considered an advanced nation. Mexico has the richest man in the world (Carlos Slim), and lots of affluence too, but no one considers them an advanced nation either. It's not gun proliferation that causes America's problems with crime, violence, and poverty. Somehow liberals seem to think that if we just get rid of the guns, we'll suddenly turn into a gigantic version of Sweden or Norway. It doesn't work that way. Those countries are ultra-safe because of their culture. We don't have that kind of culture. Our culture is more like that of El Salvador, in many areas of the country.

Reminds of this bit [theonion.com] from The Onion: Oh, sure, if you’re going to compare us to first-world countries, we’re definitely not going to come out looking so good.

It strikes me as quite ironic that a lot of your comment is essentially a backhanded concession that there are considerable advantages to a country with substantially more left-wing culture and policies.

It strikes me as quite ironic that a lot of your comment is essentially a backhanded concession that there are considerable advantages to a country with substantially more left-wing culture and policies.

That's not backhanded, that's intended. The problem is that liberals in this country think that just by adopting policies of, say, Sweden, that somehow the USA will become just like Sweden. It doesn't work like that. A country can't just will itself to be like some prosperous Scandinavian country. You mi

Gun-related suicides, for instance, aren't even worth considering in these stats; people will kill themselves one way or another, guns just make it easier and faster.

Actually no. A lot of people back out of suicide because it takes so long and requires enough preparation to give them a chance to reconsider. There is plenty of statistical and clinical evidence of them. Being able to pull a trigger results in more people going through with it.

Germany isn't as anti-gun as the UK by a long shot. See this list. [wikipedia.org] Germany has 1/3 the gun ownership the US does, and about 5 times the gun ownership of the UK. Germany comes in at #15 worldwide. 30 guns (privately-owned) per 100 residents isn't a small number.

And these mass shootings, what percentage of firearm violence do they account for? Also, in these mass shootings, how often are handguns used to kill people?

Red herring much? Mass shootings are relatively isolated incidents that account for a negligible percentage of firearm violence, and predominantly involve long guns. Handguns are responsible for a majority of firearm violence, but they're used in inner city gang-related violence, not mass shootings.

No. Criminals have proven that they are not capable of self-regulationThey're not criminals until they commit a crime. Until then, they're law-abiding citizens. Many of the massacres we've seen are first offenses.

no or outside regulation and no amount of regulatory burden on the law abiding will stop that.Yeah, if we outlaw guns, only criminals will have guns...but that's precisely the point. We now know who to arrest the person with the assault rifle who walked into a school. To wit, if regulating guns

Many of them aren't even legal to own and therefore could not possibly be purchased legally.

Citation?

I'm sure there were guns smuggled illegally into the country and then sold, but off the top of my head, I can't think of a single gun used criminally in the last several years that weren't perfectly legal to own.

A gun is a great equalizer. You can no longer just walk up to a woman who's physically weaker than you and attempt to rape her, because she might have a gun. Same with robbing an old grandma. You want to take away the right to self defense, so he or she has to fight with a knife, or a golf club, and possibly be subdued and murdered, simply because he or she is physically weaker? In fact poverty is the biggest enemy of gun ownership, people simply cannot afford a gun, like a lot of Latinos carry knives inste

Self defense. It IS still legal to shoot someone who is threatening to do the same to yourself. Fortunately it is rarely necessary. Simply being seen to have a weapoin is enough to diffuse most situations.

Do you have personal experience with this? Are there any data on that? How many lives are saved per year by the threat of gun violence?

In the absence of a study, imagine a world in which every citizen (maybe older than, say, the legal driving age) is carrying a firearm. Imagine the major population centers like NYC where the statistics would matter. Would there be fewer gun-related deaths in that world than in ours? I can't see it that way. I would feel safer in a world where people are more encouraged to deal with conflict in a nonviolent way.

Self defense. It IS still legal to shoot someone who is threatening to do the same to yourself. Fortunately it is rarely necessary. Simply being seen to have a weapoin is enough to diffuse most situations.

Do you have personal experience with this? Are there any data on that? How many lives are saved per year by the threat of gun violence?

I have 3 times in just over 10 years but never had to actually draw. Just the look of being ready to defend was enough to stave off a more serious confrontation. The firs

The National Guard didn't exist until the 20th century. The Founders didn't envision such a thing. If you want to go back to what the original Constitution allowed, you need to just have state militias.

1, That ship has sailed; it's physically impossible for armed Americans to defeat state tyranny.

That's simply wrong.For one, this argument is almost always raised as an us versus them dichotomy. However, the "state" is made up of fellow citizens; the US military is 100% citizens. If a significant enough revolution happened someday, it would involve many from that branch as well. It would be an awful and ugly affair. The state would not simply crush the people.In addition, it's very unlikely that a giant half-the-population-ish revolution would happen. If it did, it'd be such chaos that, at the very least, it would bring significant change no matter who won. If it was a smaller one, but not insignficant in size (not just one David Koresh house), and armed, it'd still have enough force to achieve many objectives. Whether they would win or not would depend (almost entirely) on the rest of the population - how they side, and what they do, including those that are part of the govenment.

If Bruce or anyone else feels like they can't trust themselves to be sane enough to have a weapon in their house, so be it... they don't have to have one. Assuming no one else should be trusted is, IMO, wrong.

I'd be fine with dropping concealed carry, or heavily restricting it... so long as open carry was more socially acceptable (it's technically legal in most places, but you won't often get very far without getting stopped/detained/arrested).

For what it's worth, I see your worst case scenario happening within the decade. It's going to start when some event stops food moving into a major metropolitan center. There's only a few days of food available to begin with, and a significant disruption of the supply will cause panic like we haven't seen in this country. Before the government would be able to open the roads again, thousands would die in the riots that would occur.

Basically, any group that wants to start something just has to shut down a do

Well, if that is your concern the states already own everything from helicopters to tanks via the "National Guard" which is basically the militia.

However, the states aren't really organized to fight as independent units. Nor are they designed to be able to oppose the Federal Government. If for some reason the Pentagon decided to wage war on Kansas, the first sign the Kansas governor would have of it would be all his national guard bases being turned into parking lots, and then he is down to whatever small

Do you really think a gun levels the playing field between you and the government? Even if there were 10,000 people with rifles trying to take on the state they would be crushed easily. The biggest concern of the military would be trying to look good like the good guys to the media.

It's a trade off. Citizens become more equal with each other, but very very slightly less equal with the state (since the state already has vastly more power). You would be better off giving up the right to own most types of guns

seem to recall something about a revolution consisting of a bunch of rag-tag farmers defeating the largest military superpower in the world about 230 years ago...

To prevail, those "ragtag farmers" depended on French aid, Prussian mercenaries, and dirty tricks like burning down the houses of anyone who wouldn't sign up to their rebellion (much of English-speaking Canada is descended from Tories who had to flee the aggression of the revolutionaries). Do you really want to bring foreign players onto US soil

Studies done by the armed forces have already shown that some of those in the military will turn on their own government if it came down to revolution.

Wow! You really shot yourself in the foot on that one. Yes you have shown how a popular revolution may defeat the military. However that solution does not require private ownership of firearms! In fact there are some indications it may work better if there are no private guns (the military defector is more likely if the people he is going to join are not shoo

You missed his point entirely. The power is already in the hands of the state, and average citizens owning rifles and handguns won't change that in the slightest. Doesn't matter how much you dream about being part of a militia that stockpiles grenades and thousands of rounds of ammo per person. The balance he's talking about is the one between citizens.

Here's the thing: the State has weapons that could reduce you, your house, your neighbourhood, or your city to a smoking ruin. They have people (stronger, faster, and more capable than you), who train daily to kill in the most effective ways, with weapons and equipment that are simply unavailable to you. If they were to take you seriously as a threat, they could locate you in seconds and put a drone through the nearest window.

So owning your very own semi-automatic, or even fully-automatic small arms is comp

You mean those groups who caused as much woe for the ordinary population around them as for the supposedly oppressive states they were fighting?

If a rebellion were to break out in the United States against the government, those taking up arms would almost certainly be a minority of the population. The majority of people would be content to accept the state for what it is and try to avoid any of the conflict. We saw that in the American Revolution wh

Plus you have to remember that many of those military personnel with the neighborhood smoking weapons will support the revolution rather than fire on American Citizens. So both sides can create craters.

You are right that some military personnel would presumably join the revolution. What are the odds that they would bring with them all the infrastructure (fuel, personnel, maintenance equipment and parts) needed to keep those A-10 Warthogs, F-18s, secure communications networks, satellite sensing systems and other high-tech machinery running as you fight the people who own the skies, seas, and telcos?

This country was founded by armed revolutionaries (you know, treasonous traitors against their legal government) who then wrote a Constitution for their new Government that said that the Governors would be selected by and rule at the consent of an armed populace. "Think of the children!" is not a valid reason to do away with that concept.

P.S. I'm one of them there "liberals" on just about any subject you can name.

WTF? Why does Bruce Perens' opinion on firearms matter? He's been involved in lots of interesting things, and can answer questions about them. I don't think his personal views on guns, abortion, or hockey are all that interesting. Why was that question even asked?

Bruce has his opinions, and he has reasons for them. Other people have different opinions, and have reasons for them. Can we leave it at that?

I was curious. For all the complaining I've heard from Republicans about 'evil liberals who want to take our guns', I'd never encountered anyone who actually wanted to do that. It's possible that I need to get out more.

I could have emailed him directly I suppose, and I did just now, but you and I seem to disagree on what is an appropriate interview question. Others seemed to have covered the technical questions. I did ask another more topical question, but I think Bruce answered it directly in the comment t

Indeed, in the grand scheme, you are suggesting that we take guns out of the hands of the individual, and put them solely in the hands of the State; that sounds like a transfer of power from the Weak to the Strong...

Are you really under the delusion that your little rifle is in any way going to be a deterrent against the US military or police forces? You think your pea shooter is going to be much use against a tank or a drone? I'm actually generally a supporter of gun rights but I think this argument that we are somehow fending off the state is absurd. It has no meaningful deterrence effect against our political leaders. If you actually get to the point where you need to use a firearm in anger against the State the

Indeed, in the grand scheme, you are suggesting that we take guns out of the hands of the individual, and put them solely in the hands of the State; that sounds like a transfer of power from the Weak to the Strong...

Try to use your firearm against the power of the US government or its agents, and then come tell us how that went.

That power was transfered in its entirety long ago. Here I'm merely paraphrasing Bruce's argument above, btw.

Why shouldn't the weak get WMDs, why does only the government (the strong) get to arm itself with nuclear weapons? So the idea is "people can protect themselves with weapons, but not the really powerful ones?"

And who makes the determination that a weapon is too powerful for an individual? The government? Why shouldn't each individual himself be allowed to decide how powerful of a weapon get gets? If I want to arm myself with a few grenades, a bazooka, and some C4, why should some Washington bureaucrat t

Regardless of whether private gun ownership is a good idea, every country in the world has a corrupt government in some form. European governments are no exception, and all kinds of rights violations happen there, just like in the US.

Speaking of which, many people who are extremely 'protective' of the 2nd amendment seem to not care all that much about the other amendments. I can't count how many times I've seen 2nd amendment supporters come out in favor of things like the NSA's mass surveillance. Anti-gun nuts do it too, of course, but it's just seemingly more of an eyesore when people pretend they care about liberty but then support policies that take us in the opposite direction.

Yes, many people of all political types seem to only want to keep their favorite Amendments in play, and throw the others out. And not even by actually passing another amendment to repeal another, like happened at the end of Prohibition. Simply support the government ignoring the rules they don't like.

One would hope that a real scientific study would shed light on the situation. Unfortunately, this isn't it. It's a paper published by a Harvard student club and written by a gun industry lobbyist and a gun enthusiast. No balanced perspective that could lead to a real scientific paper here. The first refutation I found of the paper is certainly not peer reviewed and published in a scientific journal either, but makes a pretty good case that the statistics are cooked. It's here [firedoglake.com].

'm self-employed, 40-something, etc. I can tell you from hanging around with a lot of other folks like myself - they tend to vote Republican and give to the Republicans.

Wouldn't that confirm what BP is saying? Assuming that you harbor rational self-interest, isn't it true that you don't want additional competition in your industry? If that's the case, then why wouldn't you be scared of any legislation that makes it easier for millions of smart people to enter your industry as additional competition?

Both parties are just puppets. The puppeteers may be different different for each one, but that doesn't change what The One Party really is.

After reading Slashdot for many years, I've noticed that whenever the Democrat/Republican argument is cast in favor of the Republicans in a post with unassailable logic, the invariable response is "well, both parties are the same."

Well, we have food stamps and welfare here too. But for the GP claiming seeing a doctor is a human right, it was just too much.

I would have no problem with a national health care system that was about treating accident victims or those with major congenital problems (the un-insurable). But when many issues are completely the fault of a lifestyle choice (sex, drugs, food, fast cars, skydiving, criminal activity, etc), I can't accept responsibility for those who can't accept it for themselves.

Does that mean we should bear the burden of your bad lifestyle choices? Well, we do today. Either those folks are in our emergency rooms, or they are lying on our streets. Either way, we all pay a cost.

It's not clear to me what you propose to do with them. Perhaps you should explain that a bit more clearly.

My previous post may have sounded too snide. I actually tried to explain my position with three different explanations, but deleted each in turn. I have offered my beliefs on this subject several times before, and have had the person I'm responding too either wholly dismiss it because it is too far from their accepted beliefs, or call me sub-human slime.

Now I'll give you the chance to make your own judgement on my beliefs about people and their lifestyle choices.

You meant "you wouldn't approve" rather than "you wouldn't understand".

Positioned correctly, it isn't all that socially reprehensible to state the sentiment that you don't believe you should pay for people who drive their motorcycle without helmets, people who self-administer addictive and destructive drugs, people who engage in unprotected sex with prostitutes or unprotected casual sex with strangers, and people who go climbing without using all of the safety equipment they could.

I just looked for a minute and found This NIMH study [nih.gov]. If you look at the percentages per year they are astonishingly high. 9% of people in any particular year just for mood disorders, and that's just the first on the list. Then they go down the list of other disorders. The implication is that everyone suffers some incident of mental illness in their lives. And given the number of psychiatrists, psychologists, and lay practitioners in practice, it seems like much of the population try to get